Today in Just Sayin': Atheists Know More About Religion than Religious People

May I please direct your attention to the hilarious results of a new Pew Research study that quizzed over 3,412 Americans about various religions. Who scored the best? Atheists and agnostics, followed by Jews and Mormons. The average people of all Christian faiths lagged a bit behind.

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia — the country with the world’s largest Muslim population — are Muslims. You can